NYC doing everything possible to ruin its chances for a huge World Cup windfall

Instead of rolling out the welcome mat, City Hall is doing everything possible to bury the Big Apple's hosting abilities, writes columnist Santago Vidal Calvo.  Anadolu via Getty Images

New York City is about to host the biggest sporting event on the planet — the 2026 FIFA World Cup final. 

Over 1.2 million fans will flock to the tristate area expecting American greatness at its best, bringing $3.3 billion in economic activity and supporting 26,000 local jobs. 

It’s potentially a once-in-a-generation economic windfall for the city.  

But instead of rolling out the welcome mat, City Hall is doing everything possible to bury the Big Apple’s hosting abilities. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council won’t temporarily loosen strict local rules on home-share rentals like Airbnb, limiting places for visitors to stay in Gotham — and inviting New Jersey to eat New York’s lunch.  

Meanwhile, thousands of hotel rooms have disappeared from the tourist market in New York City, new hotel construction has slowed to a crawl, and the city’s powerful hotel union is threatening a strike that could collide with the tournament. 

New York attracts massive crowds under ordinary circumstances: Last year Gotham saw over 64 million visitors, 175,000 a day on average. 

This summer will be different. 

The 2026 World Cup runs from June 11 through July 19 — 39 days — with the final scheduled for July 19 at MetLife Stadium. 

During that window, we should expect at least 1.2 million soccer fans on top of the usual tourist influx — about 7 million people.  

And those fans won’t arrive evenly enough for city hotels to handle the load.  

The schedule includes group-stage matches, knockout rounds and the late stages — creating huge spike nights when tens of thousands of visitors will need places to stay for important games. 

This is where City Hall’s policies collide with reality. 

Local Law 18 — the city’s sweeping short-term rental crackdown — effectively wiped out Airbnb and similar listings in New York. 

The law requires hosts to register with the city and forces platforms to verify those registrations before allowing bookings. 

And short-term rentals under 30 days are heavily restricted: Those hosts must be present in the unit and can have no more than two guests. 

The result? A collapse in supply. 

There are now only about 3,000 active short-term rental registrations in the Big Apple — down from tens of thousands of listings just a few years ago. 

Roughly 90% of the market disappeared after the law took effect. 

That’s good news for the hotel industry, but it eliminates exactly the kind of surge capacity desperately needed for the World Cup.

And the market is already responding: Short-term rental demand for World Cup match dates is exploding across the Hudson in New Jersey — with occupancy in the Jersey City–Newark area jumping 169% year-over-year for one match day. 

Fans will still come; they’ll just stay outside NYC — because city hotels can’t easily pick up the slack. 

NYC has roughly 121,500 hotel rooms. 

That might sound like a lot, but it’s about 6,000 fewer than in 2019.

At the same time, the city has made building new hotels harder: A 2021 zoning rule requiring a special permit for new hotels has slowed development to a trickle.

And even now, City Hall is tying up hotel capacity instead of freeing it: Mamdani’s new $1.86 billion, three-year homeless-hotel contract keeps nearly 11,000 rooms in the shelter pipeline rather than returning them to the tourist market ahead of the World Cup. 

All this means hotel prices are predictably soaring. 

The average daily room rate is now 28% higher than in 2019, according to the city’s hotel tax report. 

That’s what happens when demand rises and supply is squeezed. 

And as the soccer fans arrive, the city’s powerful hotel union could bring the entire system to a halt. 

The citywide contract of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which represents nearly 40,000 hotel workers, expires in July — right in the middle of the World Cup extravaganza. 

The union is already preparing for potential labor action to make the most of their obvious leverage during a global mega-event with millions of visitors and billions in economic activity at stake.  

That’s not civic-minded bargaining, but a narrowly self-interested strategy that risks turning New York’s biggest tourism moment in decades into a contract-season hostage crisis. 

If City Hall wants even an inch of breathing room in that fight, the obvious move would be to expand lodging supply — starting with allowing short-term rentals like Airbnb during the tournament.   

Hosting the World Cup is a massive economic opportunity, and it’s in every New Yorker’s interest to grab it. 

The $1.7 billion in direct spending the tournament could generate in NYC alone would mean $432 million in tax revenue. 

But policy decisions determine where that money actually goes. 

If the city can’t accommodate visitors, they won’t disappear: They’ll stay in New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester — anyplace with a room to rent that’s close enough to the Meadowlands. 

The city will still get the crowds, congestion, subway delays and headaches. 

But it may lose the full extent of the windfall that should come along with them. 

New York can either welcome the world and cash in — or let City Hall’s shortsightedness hand the World Cup’s biggest payday to the Garden State. 

Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute